Clerkship chaos

Clerkship applications during the Delta wave ... Round two for those who missed last year ... A blossoming clerkship coaching industry ... The killer typo ... Law firms fluff their responses ... Dispatching emails to the wrong people ... Administrative errors ... Grovels ... Barely Legal on the front line

At Gladys' 11am press conferences, tired eyes look on as daily cases surge and vaccine doses sit unused in fridges.

But there are faint signs of hope. For one, everyone will get a vaccine. It's simply, when. 

The same cannot be said for clerkships as penultimate and final year students flock to that yearly tradition of self-destruction in which the victors lock themselves into a pinstriped prison and the losers commit to trying again next year. 

For law students, the clerkship race is the real "hunger games" of 2021 with a sense of danger and gravity less like a shopper casually browsing in Woolies and more reminiscent of the toilet paper battles Royale of 2020. 

The best candidates will prevail. That is to say those with the finely honed skill of parsing firm marketing materials to divine the putative distinctions between the firms and whose brute strength in playing the "number's game" (read: preparing 10 or 20 cover letters) will prevail. 

What once made the process bearable - the canapes, free-flowing drinks and the collective solidarity of the cohort sharing in the struggles - has been replaced with virtual networking sessions.

Failure remains statistically the most likely outcome for most.

Word on the street is that last year's clerkship round was far smaller than previous years in no small part due to the virus. Final year students who missed out in 2020 are coming back for round two in an already saturated field. The result won't be pretty.

The fear of failure and the stakes involved are so great that there is now a fledgling clerkship coaching industry comprising new market entrants like ClerkshipReady which advertise itself as providing a "premium service offering" which "ensure[s] that you have the best opportunity to land a clerkship".

Its prices start from $35 for a "line-by-line review of your resume" and a "complementary follow-up call" and go all the way to mock interviews for $119, a $115 "application package" which includes the "latest firm research cheat sheet".

From ClerkshipReady's place in the Mount Sinai of clerkship advice, students have been told "the more applications, the better". 

Some have taken this advice in stride with clerkship seekers on this year's Whirlpool forum thread claiming to have applied for more than 25 firms.

For students, an errant comma or misplaced apostrophe spells the end of their hopes. Nothing kills an application faster than a typo. The only home for such applications is the bin.

Yet, the firms have proven themselves to be exempt from these rules.

On this backdrop, frustrations are unsurprisingly high and heads are rolling in the human resources departments of several firms after recent blunders.

"We really appreciate the time and effort your put into your application," read a rejection email from Norton Rose Fulbright that would struggle with a year 6 English test.

Meanwhile at Bird & Bird, a firm which advertises itself as a "top-ranked international privacy and data protection group", HR could not manage the task of getting the BCC function to work. 

In a rejection email to candidates, the email addresses of 251 rejected students were copied for the world to see. 

Not to be fazed, one student even took the opportunity to try and stay in the running: 

"Thank you for your email. Please keep my details within your system if any relevant roles become available." 

The alarm bell must have sounded because recipients soon received a flurry of emails which indicated the firm was attempting to recall the email (to no avail). 

Two hours later, the applicants were visited by an apology, which sheeted home the mistake to an "administrative error".  

For good measure, the firm instructed recipients to "please delete that email and reply to this email with the word 'deleted'." 

After all, the best apologies come with firm instructions which demand strict compliance. 

Corrs Chambers Westgarth was handing out Schrodinger's clerkships after students reported receiving an interview invitation followed immediately by a rejection. 

It remains to be seen whether it was an elaborate form of psychometric testing of students' knowledge of quantum superposition.

In a lesson learnt from the Scott Morrison school of taking responsibility, Corrs sent an apology signed off by "People & Performance". 

"It has come to our attention that some applicants for our Sydney Summer Clerkship who were unsuccessful in having their application progress to the next stage have unfortunately received in error an invitation to interview. 

At this stage we are unable to identify which unsuccessful candidates received this invitation and therefore, you are receiving this email to confirm that unfortunately we will not be progressing your application. 

We sincerely apologise for this error and again, we thank you for your interest in Corrs Chambers Westgarth and we wish you well in your future legal career."

For their sins, a HR employee was then tasked to call up applicants to provide a further apology.

Despite all the catastrophic failures with AZ and Pfizer, there are law students out there who are wishing clerkships could be as competent as the vaccine rollout.